


The Greater Gatsby

by opabinia



Category: Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Genre: First Kiss, M/M, No Smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-26
Updated: 2021-01-26
Packaged: 2021-03-12 07:07:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,947
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29006553
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/opabinia/pseuds/opabinia
Summary: This is Chapter 8 of The Great Gatsby, heavily revised by me to fix the ending. It's about 1/3 my writing, 2/3 Fitzgerald's. My goal is that people familiar with the original version will have some difficulty noticing where his words end and mine begin. This is my first fic, so comments are double appreciated.
Relationships: Nick Carraway/Jay Gatsby
Comments: 1
Kudos: 40





	The Greater Gatsby

Chapter 8   
I couldn’t sleep all night; a fog-horn was groaning incessantly on the Sound, and I tossed half-sick between grotesque reality and savage, frightening dreams. Toward dawn I heard a taxi go up Gatsby’s drive, and immediately I jumped out of bed and began to dress — I felt that I had something to tell him, something to warn him about, and morning would be too late. Had I known at that time what it was I had to tell him I could not have done so; my courage failing me I would have remained, shyly, waiting in terrible suspense for whatever might follow but relinquishing any part in writing my friend’s future. As things stood, however, I had no rational cause for fear and shook off any apprehension.  
Crossing his lawn, I saw that his front door was still open and he was leaning against a table in the hall, heavy with dejection or sleep.  
“Nothing happened,” he said wanly. “I waited, and about four o’clock she came to the window and stood there for a minute and then turned out the light.”  
His house had never seemed so enormous to me as it did that night when we hunted through the great rooms for cigarettes. We pushed aside curtains that were like pavilions, and felt over innumerable feet of dark wall for electric light switches — once I tumbled with a sort of splash upon the keys of a ghostly piano. There was an inexplicable amount of dust everywhere, and the rooms were musty, as though they hadn’t been aired for many days. I found the humidor on an unfamiliar table, with two stale, dry cigarettes inside. Throwing open the French windows of the drawing-room, we sat smoking out into the darkness.  
“You ought to go away,” I said. “It’s pretty certain they’ll trace your car.”  
“Go away NOW, old sport?”  
“Go to Atlantic City for a week, or up to Montreal.”  
He wouldn’t consider it. He couldn’t possibly leave Daisy until he knew what she was going to do. He was clutching at some last hope and I couldn’t bear to shake him free. That something I wished to tell him, that which I could not bear hold within me for another tremulous moment, rose into my throat but was caught into some spiderweb net positioned just behind my tongue. I made no attempt to dislodge it but held onto its tense sweetness.  
It was this night that he told me the strange story of his youth with Dan Cody — told it to me because “Jay Gatsby” had broken up like glass against Tom’s hard malice, and the long secret extravaganza was played out. With rapt attention I watched as this man, about whose personal history I knew only my ignorance, laid out before me the shards of what I had called Gatsby. Looking into his eyes I saw I man I barely knew but had long cared for, a brilliant young fellow from the Middle West, come into the land of milk and honey to find it all made of straw. I think that he would have confessed anything now, without reserve, but he wanted to talk about Daisy.   
She was the first “nice” girl he had ever known. In various unrevealed capacities he had come in contact with such people, but always with indiscernible barbed wire between. He found her excitingly desirable. He went to her house, at first with other officers from Camp Taylor, then alone. It amazed him — he had never been in such a beautiful house before. but what gave it an air of breathless intensity, was that Daisy lived there — it was as casual a thing to her as his tent out at camp was to him. There was a ripe mystery about it, a hint of bedrooms up-stairs more beautiful and cool than other bedrooms, of gay and radiant activities taking place through its corridors, and of romances that were not musty and laid away already in lavender but fresh and breathing and redolent of this year’s shining motor-cars and of dances whose flowers were scarcely withered. It excited him, too, that many men had already loved Daisy — it increased her value in his eyes. He felt their presence all about the house, pervading the air with the shades and echoes of still vibrant emotions.  
But he knew that he was in Daisy’s house by a colossal accident. However glorious might be his future as Jay Gatsby, he was at present a penniless young man without a past, and at any moment the invisible cloak of his uniform might slip from his shoulders. So he made the most of his time. He took what he could get, ravenously and unscrupulously — eventually he took Daisy one still October night, took her because he had no real right to touch her hand.  
He might have despised himself, for he had certainly taken her under false pretenses. I don’t mean that he had traded on his phantom millions, but he had deliberately given Daisy a sense of security; he let her believe that he was a person from much the same stratum as herself — that he was fully able to take care of her. As a matter of fact, he had no such facilities — he had no comfortable family standing behind him, and he was liable at the whim of an impersonal government to be blown anywhere about the world.  
But he didn’t despise himself and it didn’t turn out as he had imagined. He had intended, probably, to take what he could and go — but now he found that he had committed himself to the following of a grail. He knew that Daisy was extraordinary, but he didn’t realize just how extraordinary a “nice” girl could be. She vanished into her rich house, into her rich, full life, leaving Gatsby — nothing. He felt married to her, that was all.  
When they met again, two days later, it was Gatsby who was breathless, who was, somehow, betrayed. Her porch was bright with the bought luxury of star-shine; the wicker of the settee squeaked fashionably as she turned toward him and he kissed her curious and lovely mouth. She had caught a cold, and it made her voice huskier and more charming than ever, and Gatsby was overwhelmingly aware of the youth and mystery that wealth imprisons and preserves, of the freshness of many clothes, and of Daisy, gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor.  
“I can’t describe to you how surprised I was to find out I loved her, old sport. I even hoped for a while that she’d throw me over, but she didn’t, because she was in love with me too. She thought I knew a lot because I knew different things from her… . Well, there I was, ‘way off my ambitions, getting deeper in love every minute, and all of a sudden I didn’t care. What was the use of doing great things if I could have a better time telling her what I was going to do?” On the last afternoon before he went abroad, he sat with Daisy in his arms for a long, silent time. It was a cold fall day, with fire in the room and her cheeks flushed. Now and then she moved and he changed his arm a little, and once he kissed her dark shining hair. The afternoon had made them tranquil for a while, as if to give them a deep memory for the long parting the next day promised. They had never been closer in their month of love, nor communicated more profoundly one with another, than when she brushed silent lips against his coat’s shoulder or when he touched the end of her fingers, gently, as though she were asleep.  
He did extraordinarily well in the war. He was a captain before he went to the front, and following the Argonne battles he got his majority and the command of the divisional machineguns. After the Armistice he tried frantically to get home, but some complication or misunderstanding sent him to Oxford instead. He was worried now — there was a quality of nervous despair in Daisy’s letters. She didn’t see why he couldn’t come. She was feeling the pressure of the world outside, and she wanted to see him and feel his presence beside her and be reassured that she was doing the right thing after all.  
For Daisy was young and her artificial world was redolent of orchids and pleasant, cheerful snobbery and orchestras which set the rhythm of the year, summing up the sadness and suggestiveness of life in new tunes. All night the saxophones wailed the hopeless comment of the BEALE STREET BLUES. while a hundred pairs of golden and silver slippers shuffled the shining dust. At the gray tea hour there were always rooms that throbbed incessantly with this low, sweet fever, while fresh faces drifted here and there like rose petals blown by the sad horns around the floor.  
Through this twilight universe Daisy began to move again with the season; no longer enchanted—had she ever really been?—, suddenly she was again keeping half a dozen dates a day with half a dozen men, and drowsing asleep at dawn with the beads and chiffon of an evening dress tangled among dying orchids on the floor beside her bed. And all the time something within her was crying for a decision. She wanted her life shaped now, immediately — and the decision must be made by some force — of love, of money, of unquestionable practicality — that was close at hand.  
That force took shape in the middle of spring with the arrival of Tom Buchanan. There was a wholesome bulkiness about his person and his position, and Daisy was flattered. Doubtless there was a certain relief. The letter reached Gatsby while he was still at Oxford.  
It was dawn now on Long Island and we went about opening the rest of the windows down-stairs, filling the house with gray-turning, gold-turning light. The lavender shadow of a tree fell abruptly across the dew and ghostly birds began to sing among the blue leaves. There was a slow, pleasant movement in the air, scarcely a wind, promising a cool, lovely day. “I don’t think she ever loved him.” Gatsby turned around from a window and looked at me challengingly. “You must remember, old sport, she was very excited this afternoon. He told her those things in a way that frightened her — that made it look as if I was some kind of cheap sharper. And the result was she hardly knew what she was saying.”  
I made no objection to this. He sat down gloomily.  
“Of course she might have loved him just for a minute, when they were first married — and loved me more even then, do you see?”  
Suddenly he came out with a curious remark.  
“In any case,” he said, “it was just personal.”  
What could you make of that?  
He came back from France when Tom and Daisy were still on their wedding trip, and made a miserable but irresistible journey to Louisville on the last of his army pay. He stayed there a week, walking the streets where their footsteps had clicked together through the November night and revisiting the out-of-the-way places to which they had driven in her white car. Just as Daisy’s house had always seemed to him more mysterious and gay than other houses, so his idea of the city itself, even though she was gone from it, was pervaded with a melancholy beauty.  
He left feeling that if he had searched harder, he might have found her — that he was leaving her behind. The day-coach — he was penniless now — was hot. He went out to the open vestibule and sat down on a folding-chair, and the station slid away and the backs of unfamiliar buildings moved by. Then out into the spring fields, where a yellow trolley raced them for a minute with people in it who might once have seen the pale magic of her face along the casual street.  
The track curved and now it was going away from the sun, which as it sank lower, seemed to spread itself in benediction over the vanishing city where she had drawn her breath. He stretched out his hand desperately as if to snatch only a wisp of air, to save a fragment of the spot that she had made lovely for him. But it was all going by too fast now for his blurred eyes and he knew that he had lost that part of it, the freshest and the best, forever.  
It was nine o’clock when we finished breakfast and went out on the porch. The night had made a sharp difference in the weather and there was an autumn flavor in the air. I feared my time to speak—though of what I could not be certain—had passed. A sudden quickness of my pulse accompanied the approach of an unfamiliar figure. The gardener, the last one of Gatsby’s former servants, came to the foot of the steps in his red uniform.  
“I’m going to drain the pool to-day, Mr. Gatsby. Leaves’ll start falling pretty soon, and then there’s always trouble with the pipes.”  
“You might as well,” Gatsby answered. He turned to me apologetically. “You know, old sport, I’ve never used that pool all summer?”  
I thought of those fine, fickle figures who instead had made use of the pool. How strange that the master of the house, to whom the estate represented such promise and achievement, had less opportunity to enjoy it than the parade of strangers who had provided the backdrops to his ill-fated courtship ritual. Imagining for a moment Gatsby as an exotic bird-of-paradise rejected by his mate, wholly sincere and lovely and yet so terribly far from home, I could not bear to part from the wondrous creature. I cared for nothing else than to see to his happiness; and, if he could not be happy, then to be his solace.  
For the first time all morning, he looked at me with a strange expression in his eyes, and in the intensity of his glance I felt that there were two birds present, one in this fellow’s soul and the other flapping its wings indignantly from a position just above my stomach. Not daring to wonder what he had seen in my eyes, I dropped my gaze where it fell upon my watch.   
“Twelve minutes to my train,” I said, but I made no move to stand. I didn’t want to go to the city. I did not venter another glance to judge Gatsby’s expression, but there was nothing in the way he rested his foot atop his knee to indicate that he wished me to leave. The gardener returned to his post across the lawn, and we sat in silence for a long moment. I know not what he felt, but my heart had yet to calm. I felt the slightest redness form in my cheeks—ah! Curse my pale complexion! —and carefully monitored my breath in the hopes of reducing the effect.  
When at last I lifted my eyes, Gatsby’s eyes, to my relief, were fixed upon the bay, at a point on the horizon I knew must be the home of the green light that had faded some time ago with the dawn but which he must have learned by heart months ago. His was a miserable obsession, but one couldn’t help but admire the genuine feeling it attested to.  
And yet, even as I determined that he would never live any other purpose than loving Daisy, there was a resignation in his expression that was new to me. Without altering his gaze, he spoke in a softer voice than I was used to, with a slight inflection to his vowels that betrayed his humble origins.  
“Do you think, old sport,” he said at last, “D’ya think she would have loved Gatz?” I did not know how to answer, but I perceived in his words a corollary to his question—that without a doubt that man would have loved her.   
“They’re a rotten crowd,” I told him instead. “You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.”  
He turned from the shifting sea to me. Between our simple wooden chairs stood my cottage’s small porch table, with two cold coffees and the empty plates that had held our meager breakfasts.  
“You have missed your train by now.”  
“I have.” Again I defied duty by not standing. He shifted in his seat.  
“I suppose I must return.”  
“A man of status may determine his own schedule,” I insisted.  
“Surely Daisy’ll call,” he suggested, but the desperation I was accustomed to accompanying mention of that name was all but vanished. I felt a surge of defiance.  
“No she won’t.” I said curtly.  
“What did you say, old sport?” He was more startled than offended, but a hint of anger in his tone warned me to tread lightly. I looked at him intently, holding back my own anger, though I knew not what inspired it. The restrained blush returned. My next words were a shock to us both.  
“You are a fool, Gatsby.” The words fell hard out of my mouth like rocks, an avalanche of pain and rage. “James Gatz, you are a fool. But it is no matter, see—I too am a fool. And Jordan Baker, and Tom, and most of all Daisy. We are all such pitiable pathetic wretches.” I wanted to stop, and he wanted me to as well, but the curiosity of what I might say next held us both in place.  
“We are fools, and in our foolishness we come to the East to find our fortunes. But what is New York? What possible goodness is there to be found in a place such as this, where the guise of class betrays a common junk heap! Your business dealings, Tom’s parties, underground speakeasies—is that the city of your dreams? How easy it is to find, if only you pinch your nose on the train and hide your face from the ruin around you! Industry, poverty, simple men whose wives run about behind their backs. There is but one man who sees this place for what it is, and his name is T. J. Eckleburg!”  
I rose to punctuate my revelation by brandishing my arms out before me. It was lucky the gardener had long since left and no-one else had appeared, for I must have looked a madman.  
“This whole place is rotten to the core, and in chasing your own vanity you think you can escape it, but all you do is dress it up in finery. You lie to yourself and call it success. I am no exception.  
“I thought myself an Alger boy, a romantic hero striding forth into a grand new world. Are these the dreams of a pioneer, destined to succumb to diphtheria a hundred miles from home? A member of the ill-fated Roanoke? An Aztec warrior whose rise to greatness is ceased by a conquistador’s whim? What if there is no brilliant future, James? What if the “city on a hill” was never anything but a lie we tell their children so that we never have to face the futility of our sacrifices?  
“Lies, all lies! There are no winners, only survivors. We delude ourselves and, in our delusions, sail away from anything that might resemble happiness. And Daisy? Your “Daisy” is a girl who never existed. You had to own her past to make her yours, but that would mean rewriting her person to suit your needs. The more time you spent with her, the more desperate you became to find your love as it shrank in the totality of her being. My dear cousin, the wispy flower who slipped effortlessly through the streets of Louisville; my dear cousin, who wouldn’t have you until you had a fortune of your own; my dear cousin, the impatient flirt who couldn’t bear to miss out on the company of men; my dear cousin, the adulterer; my dear cousin, the murderer!”  
At this, “James” jumped to his feet, his own cheeks bright with feeling.  
“You know as well as I do it was an accident!”  
“I don’t care why she hit that woman. I care that her self-preservation blocked her common decency. Like a coward she fled and sheltered herself in her husband’s wealth. You know as well as I do that not one ounce of her heart bothers to dwell on the life that she took!”  
The truth of my outburst gave him pause, and he stood panting with the miserable realization that perhaps I was right. I saw a puffiness below his eyes from our long night that with time would turn to purple bags, and I realized that I was exhausted myself. I said as much to him, but he did not leave the porch.  
“Why don’t you come inside?” I said. “We can have a few hours’ rest, then speak calmly.” He assented by a gentle nod and followed me into the cottage. It would have made more sense to go to Gatsby’s, but neither could I let him be alone nor go into that place which I had begun to despise. He was too exhausted to suggest any other course of action.  
The bungalow was empty. My Finn had caught a bad cold and was not expected for another few days. There wasn’t much to it: a little kitchen area was ticked behind the sitting room where Daisy and Gatsby’s reconciliation had taken place, and besides the washroom the only other room was the bedroom, with one bed on either side, a relic of my original plan for a room mate. Sparing barely enough time to remove my shoes, I collapsed into the soft mattress.  
I did not sleep immediately, but instead lay in that strange state wherein dreams and reality merge. In this haze I watched, transfixed, as my friend took the time to remove the pink coat that had caused such a fuss yesterday. I wondered why it mattered so much to Tom. It was a lovely color, really, like the prairie roses of my childhood visits to the country. He folded it and placed it carefully on the table where I kept my books. When he loosened his tie, I had a better view of the hard, round Adam’s apple that would punctuate his sentences with its bobbing up and down. Turning away from me, he unbuttoned the vest underneath it, also pink, and took it off to reveal his white undershirt. He unbuckled his belt and slid it off his hips, causing his trousers to slip slightly and reveal a band of pale, untanned skin where his undershirt met his shorts. The trousers, too, he took off and folded carefully before adding them to the pile. He stood there a moment, considering the view from the small window above the table, and for the first time I found myself admiring the impression made by his figure.  
His thighs were broad and strong, with a dark brown layer of fine hairs thickening as they made their way down to his calf and ankle. His calves were not as pronounced as a sportsman like Tom, but they told of long walks. His back—from what I could see—was sculpted by his muscles and drew attention to his smooth, broad shoulders. And his arms, most defined out of all his body, looked as if they could lift a man as if it was nothing. By the time he left his place at the window, I must have been dreaming, for his jacket had taken the shape of a large pink bird and flown itself out into the garden. Now I want to go back a little and tell what happened at the garage after we left there the night before.  
They had difficulty in locating the sister, Catherine. She must have broken her rule against drinking that night, for when she arrived she was stupid with liquor and unable to understand that the ambulance had already gone to Flushing. When they convinced her of this, she immediately fainted, as if that was the intolerable part of the affair. Some one, kind or curious, took her in his car and drove her in the wake of her sister’s body.  
Until long after midnight a changing crowd lapped up against the front of the garage, while George Wilson rocked himself back and forth on the couch inside. For a while the door of the office was open, and every one who came into the garage glanced irresistibly through it. Finally someone said it was a shame, and closed the door. Michaelis and several other men were with him; first, four or five men, later two or three men. Still later Michaelis had to ask the last stranger to wait there fifteen minutes longer, while he went back to his own place and made a pot of coffee. After that, he stayed there alone with Wilson until dawn.  
About three o’clock the quality of Wilson’s incoherent muttering changed — he grew quieter and began to talk about the yellow car. He announced that he had a way of finding out whom the yellow car belonged to, and then he blurted out that a couple of months ago his wife had come from the city with her face bruised and her nose swollen.  
But when he heard himself say this, he flinched and began to cry “Oh, my God!” again in his groaning voice. Michaelis made a clumsy attempt to distract him.  
“How long have you been married, George? Come on there, try and sit still a minute and answer my question. How long have you been married?”  
“Twelve years.”  
“Ever had any children? Come on, George, sit still — I asked you a question. Did you ever have any children?”  
The hard brown beetles kept thudding against the dull light, and whenever Michaelis heard a car go tearing along the road outside it sounded to him like the car that hadn’t stopped a few hours before. He didn’t like to go into the garage, because the work bench was stained where the body had been lying, so he moved uncomfortably around the office — he knew every object in it before morning — and from time to time sat down beside Wilson trying to keep him more quiet.  
“Have you got a church you go to sometimes, George? Maybe even if you haven’t been there for a long time? Maybe I could call up the church and get a priest to come over and he could talk to you, see?”  
“Don’t belong to any.”  
“You ought to have a church, George, for times like this. You must have gone to church once. Didn’t you get married in a church? Listen, George, listen to me. Didn’t you get married in a church?”  
“That was a long time ago.”  
The effort of answering broke the rhythm of his rocking — for a moment he was silent. Then the same half-knowing, half-bewildered look came back into his faded eyes.  
“Look in the drawer there,” he said, pointing at the desk.  
“Which drawer?”  
“That drawer — that one.”  
Michaelis opened the drawer nearest his hand. There was nothing in it but a small, expensive dog-leash, made of leather and braided silver. It was apparently new.  
“This?” he inquired, holding it up.  
Wilson stared and nodded.  
“I found it yesterday afternoon. She tried to tell me about it, but I knew it was something funny.”  
“You mean your wife bought it?”  
“She had it wrapped in tissue paper on her bureau.” Michaelis didn’t see anything odd in that, and he gave Wilson a dozen reasons why his wife might have bought the dog-leash. But conceivably Wilson had heard some of these same explanations before, from Myrtle, because he began saying “Oh, my God!” again in a whisper — his comforter left several explanations in the air.  
“Then he killed her,” said Wilson. His mouth dropped open suddenly.  
“Who did?”  
“I have a way of finding out.”  
“You’re morbid, George,” said his friend. “This has been a strain to you and you don’t know what you’re saying. You’d better try and sit quiet till morning.”  
“He murdered her.”  
“It was an accident, George.”  
Wilson shook his head. His eyes narrowed and his mouth widened slightly with the ghost of a superior “Hm!”  
“I know,” he said definitely, “I’m one of these trusting fellas and I don’t think any harm to nobody, but when I get to know a thing I know it. It was the man in that car. She ran out to speak to him and he wouldn’t stop.”  
Michaelis had seen this too, but it hadn’t occurred to him that there was any special significance in it. He believed that Mrs. Wilson had been running away from her husband, rather than trying to stop any particular car.  
“How could she of been like that?”  
“She’s a deep one,” said Wilson, as if that answered the question. “Ah-h-h ——” He began to rock again, and Michaelis stood twisting the leash in his hand. “Maybe you got some friend that I could telephone for, George?”  
This was a forlorn hope — he was almost sure that Wilson had no friend: there was not enough of him for his wife. He was glad a little later when he noticed a change in the room, a blue quickening by the window, and realized that dawn wasn’t far off. About five o’clock it was blue enough outside to snap off the light.  
Wilson’s glazed eyes turned out to the ashheaps, where small gray clouds took on fantastic shape and scurried here and there in the faint dawn wind.  
“I spoke to her,” he muttered, after a long silence.  
“I told her she might fool me but she couldn’t fool God. I took her to the window.”— with an effort he got up and walked to the rear window and leaned with his face pressed against it ——” and I said ‘God knows what you’ve been doing, everything you’ve been doing. You may fool me, but you can’t fool God!’”  
Standing behind him, Michaelis saw with a shock that he was looking at the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg, which had just emerged, pale and enormous, from the dissolving night.  
“God sees everything,” repeated Wilson.  
“That’s an advertisement,” Michaelis assured him. Something made him turn away from the window and look back into the room. But Wilson stood there a long time, his face close to the window pane, nodding into the twilight.  
By six o’clock Michaelis was worn out, and grateful for the sound of a car stopping outside. It was one of the watchers of the night before who had promised to come back, so he cooked breakfast for three, which he and the other man ate together. Wilson was quieter now, and Michaelis went home to sleep; when he awoke four hours later and hurried back to the garage, Wilson was gone.  
His movements — he was on foot all the time — were afterward traced to Port Roosevelt and then to Gad’s Hill, where he bought a sandwich that he didn’t eat, and a cup of coffee. He must have been tired and walking slowly, for he didn’t reach Gad’s Hill until noon. Thus far there was no difficulty in accounting for his time — there were boys who had seen a man “acting sort of crazy,” and motorists at whom he stared oddly from the side of the road. Then for three hours he disappeared from view. The police, on the strength of what he said to Michaelis, that he “had a way of finding out,” supposed that he spent that time going from garage to garage thereabout, inquiring for a yellow car. On the other hand, no garage man who had seen him ever came forward, and perhaps he had an easier, surer way of finding out what he wanted to know. By half-past two he was in West Egg, where he asked someone the way to Gatsby’s house. So by that time he knew Gatsby’s name.  
When I opened my eyes again it was midday and Gatsby was still asleep. I was relieved to see him. Quietly I stood and went to my closet to replace yesterday’s outfit with something clean, but when after removing my shirt and pants I happened to glace behind me, I saw that he was awake as well. He sat silent as he considered my form. I stopped perusing my wardrobe and went to him, perching myself at the other end of the bed.  
I barely recognized the man—with sleep had gone his anger, yes, but all his pretensions as well. His hope was replaced with a guarded self-certainty, his anxieties with acceptance. But when he smiled it was the same smile as ever, the one that promised he and I were together bound in some secret scheme against the dull world.  
“Gatsby—”  
“James,” he said. “You called me James this morning, and I liked it.”  
“James,” I said. I let the word hang in the air between us, and the silence it left us to was comfortable and easy.  
“Nick,” he replied, something teasing in the sound. In one fluid motion he shifted his body to the foot of the bed, inches from where I sat.  
“I’ve been thinking about what you said,” he continued. “I can’t agree with your total pessimism, but about the Buchanans I think you may be right.”  
“That’s a relief. I couldn’t bear it if you were mad at me.”  
“Don’t worry about that, old sport.” His voice lowered almost to a purr, and he leaned toward me, that smile still in place, as if daring me to shrink away. I was still, feeling his breath on my face and my quickening heartbeat, which must have shaken the bed with its ferocity. James:  
“It’s time to let the past alone.”  
And then he kissed me, and I knew why I was loathe to let him leave. My mind stunned, my body moved of its own accord, and I fell upon him back onto the bed. There, for the first time, I gave myself to him. I decided my coming to the East was not so foolhardy after all.  
Later we would learn of the terrible events of the afternoon. The chauffeur — he was one of Wolfsheim’s proteges — heard the shots — afterward he could only say that he hadn’t thought anything much about them. The phone in the sitting room alerted us to the emergency, and after dressing we rushed to the pool next door to see. There was a faint, barely perceptible movement of the last few inches of water as the fresh flow from one end urged its way toward the drain at the other. With little ripples that were hardly the shadows of waves, the body of the poor gardener had his clothes pulled back and forth. A small gust of wind that scarcely corrugated the surface was enough to disturb the water. The touch of a cluster of leaves revolved him slowly, tracing, like the leg of compass, a thin red circle in the water.  
It was after we started with the man toward the house that the chauffer saw the limp remains of Wilson, who in his vengeful state had confused the gardener for his master, a little way off in the grass, and the scene was complete.


End file.
